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StarCraft 2 now allows 'spawning' for friends without game

Blizzard has been allowing players to get a limited StarCraft 2 experience for free for quite some time now with its Starter Edition, but now players who don't want to shell out cash for the full game can get an upgraded experience as long as they have a friend who isn't so stingy with the cash.

Blizzard has been allowing players to get a limited StarCraft 2 experience for free for quite some time now with its Starter Edition, but now players who don't want to shell out cash for the full game can get an upgraded experience as long as they have a friend who isn't so stingy with the cash.

Blizzard has re-introduced spawning, which allows players who have a lower level version of the game to be "spawned up" to a higher version of they group up with a person who has the upgraded title. So if you have Wings of Liberty, but group up with someone playing Heart of the Swarm, you will get to play HotS as well as long as you stay grouped, according to a post on the official StarCraft 2 blog. The process is similar to what was used for Warcraft 2 and the original StarCraft to allow players to bring in their friends. If a player has no version of the game at all, they can create a Battle.net account and download the starter edition, then group up.

For those of you who love achievements, Blizzard has added one for spawning up a pal, and you get a new portrait to boot. Check out the video describing process in detail, narrated by community manager Cloaken.

John Keefer

Contributing Editor

John Keefer is a curmudgeon that has been in journalism for 35 years, the last 16 in the video games industry. He loves real-time strategy games and prefers old-school Total Annihilation to StarCraft. He also loves isometric RPGs, and has been addicted to World of Warcraft for more than 10 years. He sucks at shooters and multiplayer and is purely a PC guy. And being a former member of Shack, he also likes Chatty. Go figure.